'World’s Fair', a fiction that creates the "illusion of a memoir," unlocks a history at once personal and social, two dimensions of memory that are of necessity interrelated. The central episodes, two visits to the 1939 World’s Fair, one made by the young protagonist-narrator in the company of a school friend, and one by the protagonist and his family, are analyzed in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories about carnival and with attention to how Doctorow suggests that carnival can foster a dialogue of voices representing the centripetal and centrifugal forces of a culture.